Mary Robinson: on trial in the public court.(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University

Trials for Adultery: or, the History of Divorces. Being Select Trials at Doctors Commons for Adultery, Fornication, Cruelty, Impotence, &c. From the Year 1760, to the present Time. Including the whole of the Evidence in each Cause. Together with the Letters, &c. that have been intercepted between the amorous Parties. The whole forming a complete History of the Private Life, Intrigues, and Amours of many Characters in the most elevated Sphere: every Scene and Transaction, however ridiculous, whimsical, or extraordinary, being fairly represented, as becomes a faithful Historian, who is fully determined not to sacrifice Truth at the Shrine of Guilt and Folly. Taken in Short-Hand, by a Civilian. (1)

DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, THE WAYS IN WHICH NARRATIVE STRATEGIES of a variety of discourses influenced and helped construct each other's worlds in relation to the tensions produced by the socio-political stresses of the French Revolution were intensely focused on the family and its networks. These bi-directional influences were so successful that they have become normalized, the literary reflections of these influences being read as indelible textual strategies. This essay considers the production of narrative intersections in legal, popular culture, and literary discourses through the case of Mary Robinson (1758--1800) to examine how a woman celebrity, known for her sexual liaisons and acting career as much as for her copious literary production, and most famous for belonging to the pre-Regency constellation of the demi-monde, responded in nuanced ways to public representations of her--both ad hominem or scandal mongering publications, and politicized or critical public images--in her autobiographical poetry and fiction. These representations participated in the shifting relations between the public sphere and its irascible advocate, publicity. Robinson's literary responses were indirect, often deflecting attention away from her own story and sense of victimization toward the general cultural fate of women. I am particularly interested in Robinson's use of images of the stressed, fractured, or threatened family to expose a variety of gender inequalities that heightened men's political and social flexibility at the expense of women's. In Robinson's texts the family becomes denaturalized, its presumptive structure put in question, not because of female behavior but because of legal codes that safeguarded a cultural double standard in which manliness expends domestic ties. In order to flesh out the relation between legal and cultural standards in Robinson's textual bodies, I will be less concerned with the more obvious choices of her (seemingly) domesticating narratives--her Lyrical Tales for instance, or her novels depicting families in threat--and more concerned with those autobiographical texts that allow her to stage publicly the manly attacks of others on her person as an exploration of the gendered implications of such attacks, and to put forward a self-defense that redresses their legal sanctioning. (2)

1. Proper Discourses

To speak of propriety in relation to one of the more celebrated members of London's late eighteenth-century demi-monde may seem an odd beginning, except that Mary Robinson's literary career was in many ways a quest for respectability, and "proper" was not always a term applicable to the social elite. Neither the Prince of Wales nor any of the women sexually associated with him, including his wife, were able to muster this trait with any frequency, the exception being the mistress to which he repeatedly returned, Maria Fitzherbert. Discursive propriety must itself be held in relation to the fictional quality of any text; even in proper or defensible discourses disinterestedness vies with public interest. As the volume title I have taken for my epigraph reveals despite its disclaimer, the historical fact of legal transcriptions is self-interested: narratively framed as the exposure of private acts for public good, the title titillates even as it screens authorial scandal mongering. The same dynamic was at work in political cartoons of the day, whose immense popularity and often daily publication spread reputed or reported scandal faster than any verbal text could do. (3)

Facts must be balanced against images of the ideal woman and the ideal family that the press simultaneously used to rebuke and slander public figures whether they were "fairly represented, as becomes a faithful Historian" or misreported as becomes the partisan press. Mary Robinson was well aware of this truism as she struggled throughout her life to maintain a reputable character despite what must have seemed at times continuous onslaught in the press, with its vicious political caricatures. The exposure of public sphere assaults on individuals depended on assigning morally questionable intentions to individual or private acts, a dependence also necessary to the trade in criminal conversation or adultery narratives. ("Crim con" trials were suits for damages against the wife's lover, often preliminary to a Parliamentary divorce trial, but also occasionally used by husbands to lucratively pimp their wives. Narratives of these trials were usually anonymous scripts by law students and clerks, cheaply published.) (4) However, the press exposes were amplified by partisan conflict, character slander, and the substitution of proper character for caricature. These elements of public warfare, often amounting to publicity stunts, could take on the group quality of armies battling--Tories, Whigs and radicals fought each other by singling out individuals to stand for the whole--but for the individuals in question, public attack could feel like a dueling match to which they must respond in counter-feints or self-defense. Such an experience was fraught, however, for once individuals speak for themselves they step out of the synecdochal position publicly assigned them, and implicitly accept the charge of impropriety. Their published defense can now be publicly evaluated as a proper discourse or, to use the term for civil cases attempting monetary damages for adultery, as a criminal conversation. The analogy is helpful in understanding the tensions to which women were particularly vulnerable. By the mid-eighteenth century, monetary claims had largely replaced dueling to settle male disputes of honor, and by the 1780s and '90s the courts were virtually flooded with crim con cases. (5) Just as money had symbolically replaced the lawful exchange of sword thrusts or pistol shots, so discourse entered the symbolic realm of repute and character assassination as words became an acceptable vehicle for duels of honor, to be judged thereby. Improper characterization, whether unfounded press attacks or anti-republican, anti-social, or sexually titillating texts, might appeal to the public's love of partisan politicking and scandal, but personal defenses needed to abide by the public-sphere laws of warfare: one may be judged innocent or guilty, but he will be judged by men's laws. Women must know beforehand that these laws privilege idealized femininity, the erasure of real women, and a presumption of female guilt if a woman attempts to defend herself.

For a woman, the figurative charge of criminal conversation was whatever would single her out for publicized attack, whether in the law court, the press, or political cartoons, tarnishing her forever. In "Congreve's Way of the World and Popular Criminal Literature," John E. Loftis explores the relation between actual published accounts of trials and a dramatic scene in which crim con trials are used to leverage behavior in a play that may have influenced Robinson's self-interpretation as legally disenfranchised. (6) Loftis reads the concise dialogue of Congreve's scene to indicate the audience's familiarity with the "events and artifacts and the attitudes associated with them" as well as the way in which the threat of such a trial "embodies values and cultural attitudes in action" (562). Any woman who lived in the public eye needed to emphasize propriety and proper family relations to escape such charges; any woman who inhabited the "ton" as Mary Robinson did, dancing along the edge separating the demi-monde from polite society, was a chargeable target. And yet Robinson could not accept this fact of manly culture, and attempted throughout her career to assert her right to speak out in the public forum.

Although Mary Robinson was born to a respectable middle-class family, her American father's seafaring career and financial disasters eventually led to his desertion of the family, leaving wife and children to manage on their own. Despite this, Robinson received an intermittent formal education, including time at a finishing school north of Westminster where David Garrick saw her. Although she chose to marry rather than act with Garrick in King Lear (he offered to train her as Cordelia, giving her the confidence later to try acting), both options provided similar outcomes in her case. Her law clerk husband Thomas Robinson, an illegitimate son, had married her in an unsuccessful attempt to secure recognition and an inheritance from his father, and after the couple moved to London he sought to use her sexually to gain loans from aristocratic friends. (7) However, escaping marital disaster by taking up the stage at this juncture would also have placed Mary, not born to a thespian family as was Sarah Siddons, in a less than respectable career. In any case, the Robinsons soon landed in debtor's prison where Mary launched her literary career with a subscription volume of poetry, and from there the stage represented a different kind of respectability. (8)

Thus Mary Robinson began her career in an interesting subject-position regarding both the ideal nuclear and extended family model, for her father abandoned their family during her adolescence, and her mother encouraged her to marry--without evidence of his finances--a man who turned out to be a "counterfeit," the illegitimate product of adultery. Within this already improper situation, her husband Thomas Robinson encouraged his friends to consider her sexual favors a token of economic exchange (the same exchange on trial in crim con disputes). When she and her husband separated in 1780 after the birth of two daughters, her acting career, her brief but highly public reign as mistress of the Prince of Wales, and her long-term liaison with the war hero Colonel Tarleton situated Robinson as a demi-mondaine. If all her life she struggled to resist the character of a demi-rep, a woman of tarnished reputation, she nevertheless also labored to retain the status accorded the demi-monde as supplement to le beau monde. Demi-mondaine hostesses and courtesans could wield considerable power, and were sometimes difficult to distinguish from social elites like Lady Jersey and Lady Conyngham, later mistresses to the Prince of Wales (more tarnished now than when Robinson was his intimate). Such power was worth preserving, as Robinson knew.

Herself no icon of domesticity, it may then seem odd that Robinson's poems and novels continually focus on the roles of mothers and daughters, women in love and those deserted by their lovers, in terms of family models in their ideal and exploded forms. But in fact, familial terms are brought to trial in her works, tyrannical relations pitted against companionate marriages, and marital codes compared to the expressive liberation of Rousseau's emotionalism and espousal of sincere love. Robinson also walked the other side of the line: as much as she attempts to think through in literary works the critical nexus of family relations in a radicalized time moving inexorably towards a reactionary conservatism, and as much as her memoir, her Wollstonecraftian feminist pamphlet, and her novels attempt to establish authorial and personal propriety, Robinson also wrote much verse, from her Della Cruscan odes to her autobiographical Sappho and Phaon (1796), that countered a proper self with a Rousseauistic one, playing out her passions publicly for all to see. This emotionalism served to give depth to a character continually at the mercy of public rumor regarding her less than circumspect liaisons, public chastisement in print caricatures, and public opinion regarding adultery and divorce. But such texts did not help Robinson defend herself as did the more proper discourse of her novels and discrete verse. In reflecting on chaste marriage versus Rousseau's assertion of emotional and physical imperatives (leading to the promulgation of "free love" as well as the public fascination with criminal conversation), Robinson's novels could argue against legalistic definitions of the family that made familial irresponsibility possible. Her emotion-based texts, by contrast, draw on an affiliate sensibility to...

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